I already had a simulated VCS3 but here is the !!OFFICIAL!! simulated iVCS3 complete with a testimonial from Peter Zinovieff who at no point actually says how closely it matches the real thing. Presumably if it sucked he wouldn’t have said anything, but c’mon son. Reading through the notes the author has spent much time catching all the inverted waves and dodgy signals of the original machine, so Synthedit it ain’t.

Anyway it makes the same horrible fucking noise as the real thing and I’m sure if that’s what you were after you are on to a bargain off the usual $10,000 price. Running on an iPad suits the iVCS3. The WIndows versions are too tiny, and while there’s a fair bit of dragging up and down it’s much better than hurting your eyes on those tiny dials. Plugging in the pins and turning the dials – all is good on my iPad.

The software comes from Alessandro Petrolati, who’s taken Apesoft as his company name, and a bad decision it is. Because his area is experimental interfaces for Csound running on iOS that produce very old school experimental sounds, and ‘Apesoft’ doesn’t quite have that Stockhausen pomp to it, never mind that a Stockhausen piece is one of the titles on offer.

Also on offer:

Stria is up to 240 FM oscillators with ‘spectral grid generators’ and event ‘pitch jittering’. Named after a piece by Chowning it makes burbling, babbling and howling sounds of the sort that fill the old avant garde compositions you know and love – Kontakte, Visage etc.

iDensity and iPulsaret are similar devices that work with granular synthesis, and are not unique on the iPad where you can find a similar tools like Borderlands and Samplr. “iDensity is a new real-time software designed for asynchronous sound file granulation” while “iPulsaret is a new real-time software capable of all time-domain varieties of granular synthesis.” as it says in the ads.

Stria is the best of the batch, but there is a bundle. One could get an arts grant in 1970 with any of them.